Dinner at my parents every Sunday was a thing. You went unless you were vomiting from the flu or were recovering from major surgery. My aunt and uncle and cousins were there every week too, and my brother Marco had brought his girlfriend, Rebecca, for the first time, which was basically a sign of commitment. You didn’t bring just anyone to Sunday dinner, but they both looked uncomfortable with the reference to marriage and who could blame them? They’d only been dating a few months, but my grandmother had been sighing and giving them meaningful looks all afternoon.
For some reason, I’d been seated to the right of her at the table since I was about six, and it was a dubious honor. She was always overfeeding me and always criticizing me. My eyebrows were too thick, then too thin once I waxed them. I was too fat, too thin. Too outspoken, too quiet. I was silly to focus on my art, then silly to want to work in an office. She hated my clothes, no matter what they were. Yet I knew she would murder a man with nothing but her attitude and her handbag if he ever tried to hurt me.
“Robin Bernadette,” she said, using my middle name like she always did, because it was a saint’s name, whereas Robin was too English and pagan in her opinion. “You look like a girl who has had her heart broken. Tell your abuela who this rotten boy is.”
Unfortunately, while Nathan might have proven himself rotten, it wasn’t his fault. Not really.
“Mama, I think that’s old news,” my dad said. “Haven’t you noticed she keeps sneaking looks at her cell phone under the table? And she’s smiling today. There’s a new boy.” He tapped his temple, looking smug. “Trust me.”
Well, since they had me all figured out, there wasn’t much for me to say.
I wondered then about how we are raised, how it shapes us. Tyler and Phoenix had grown up with addicts, Rory without a mother, Jessica with a father who ran a huge church, while Kylie and I grew up in the so-called ordinary nuclear family. How had that made me who I was? Was it so very ordinary that I was ordinary?
I do know that when I applied to college I stressed over that damn entrance essay because what did I have to say? I couldn’t outline how I invented an app for family members of cancer patients or did missionary work in Africa or was the daughter of a senator or had to navigate gang warfare to get to the community center where there was one teacher who believed in me. I lived in a middle income multicultural suburb of white, black, and Hispanic families where both parents worked as teachers, bank tellers, warehouse managers. Nothing other than ordinary people doing ordinary things.
My mother wanted me to milk my Latina heritage in my essay, but it felt like bullshit to me, so I didn’t. I wrote about expressing myself through art. My twelfth-grade English teacher gave me a C and suggested a rewrite. I didn’t. But I got in to the design school and that was all I ever really wanted, so I figured it didn’t matter.
Yet then I guess I fell off the rails, even though it didn’t feel like that at the time. It just felt like a party. But now, it didn’t feel like me.
Was it because I didn’t have a strong identity or a real sense of myself? Was that what my high school boyfriend had meant? That I had a quasi sense of self?
I didn’t know.
But I did know that today my father was right. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling just a little. Despite my grandmother’s comments about my disappearing breasts and my chicken wrists. Despite knowing that it was going to be hard to have Kylie and Nathan around the apartment.
“Leave her alone,” my aunt Marguerite told my grandmother. “She looks beautiful, as usual.”
“Actually, she looks hungover,” Eric said.
That had me sitting up straighter. “I’m not hungover. I don’t drink.” That was one thing I did know. I wasn’t going to be accused of doing something I was determined to stay away from.
The look he gave me was so skeptical that I made a face back at him.
My phone buzzed in my lap. When I glanced down I saw that Phoenix had sent me a text. Glancing down and up in the ridiculous hope that no one would guess what I was doing, I read the text.
Ink I want. What do u think?
It was his sketch of the snake from the park. I couldn’t imagine where that was going to fit on his body, but I guess there were parts I hadn’t seen yet. Yet? I felt my cheeks grown warm and when I raised my eyes I felt the beady-eyed stare of my grandmother. She said something in Spanish and I had no clue what it was.
But I didn’t really want to know.
When I got back to the house around seven, Rory and Kylie were watching TV and they waved to me. “Sit.” Kylie patted the couch next to her. “We totally need to catch up.”
I should. I knew I had to. But I panicked. I couldn’t sit there and pretend nothing had happened. I wasn’t ready, or strong enough, and the scene from that morning was still fresh in my mind. The embarrassment I had felt when I had seen Nathan.
“I actually feel sick,” I said. “I have super bad cramps. I need to lay down.”
“Oh, bummer,” Kylie said. “Take some Midol.” She didn’t look the least bit suspicious because Kylie never believed anyone had ill intention. It was a gift she had, of pure happiness, all the time. Happiness I would destroy if she found out the truth.
Rory was eyeing me like she knew there was more to it than that, but she would never ask. She would think about it, analyze, study me. The one person I really had to avoid, truthfully, was Jessica. And, of course, Tyler. He knew almost all there was to know, but even he didn’t know it went way beyond just making out in a car. Obviously Nathan wasn’t going to tell, though I didn’t want to see him either.
“Thanks. Glad you’re both back,” I said, forcing a smile.
Then I went down the hall and shut the door firmly to my little room. Sighing, I fell onto my bed and answered Phoenix.
We texted back and forth for three hours, about everything, about nothing, until the TV in the living room went off and the line of light under my door disappeared. I felt safe in my room and relieved when Rory and Kylie went to bed. Classes started the next day, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for the pressure of schoolwork, but at midnight, in the dark, with Phoenix distracting me, I thought I could deal.
He was funny, in a sly, side door kind of way.
He was also clearly interested in keeping the conversation going, and maybe it was me, maybe it would have been anyone who would talk to him, but I was grateful.
And even as I worried that developing feelings for a guy I felt grateful to was seriously pathetic, I couldn’t stop myself.
Nite, I finally texted him when my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.
See you tomorrow.
I closed my eyes, but I wished he was lying next to me, his quiet, steady breathing soothing me the way it had the past two nights.
It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all.
I knew I should cancel lunch with him. I knew I should pull away. That I couldn’t let myself get pulled into a friendship I wasn’t ready for, because I was still too raw, still holding on to my secret.
But I couldn’t pull away.
Just the opposite.
When I saw Phoenix walking across the food court in the university center the next day, I bit my lip to keep from smiling too broadly. I was sitting at a table with plastic chairs around it, my backpack on the floor next to me. I had decided to wear another sundress again because they were so comfortable. My leg stubble was starting to grow back in, which meant I was on the edge of being a hippie, but the skirt was long enough that I had decided I didn’t care. Phoenix was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, nothing weird, but without a backpack, he did look a little unusual. But what mostly struck me was the way he moved through the crowd, looking neither right or left, with a confidence and an aggressive walk that made people shift out of his way, probably without even realizing they did it.